Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Gina Lola.'s avatar

What a lovely surprise to see you pop up today. With words! And they are just as touching and inspirational as ever. I love how you share your truth. No matter where you are in the ebb or flow of life’s mystery. You are a gift to all who search for clues about how and when to expand or let go of the vast questions! Xo

Expand full comment
Tamara's avatar

This is a stunning invocation of the in-between, not as a waiting room, but as a wilderness with its own strange gravity. Your refusal to sentimentalise the loss of self, your willingness to let the old you go without embalming her in nostalgia, is one of the most tender things a woman can do past 40. Because, let’s be honest, the world teaches us how to debut, not how to dissolve.

Maybe the new language we’re searching for isn’t verbal at all, not yet. Maybe it’s somatic. Cellular. Maybe the new self doesn’t arrive in words but in weather, barometric shifts in our being. The selfie, once an attempt at preservation, now feels like an intrusion on a body still mid-metamorphosis. Like photographing a chrysalis and calling it a butterfly.

Can we also talk about how evolution gave us skin that bruises easier with age, but hearts that hold more complexity, not less? And how maybe that is the exchange: less collagen, more capacity for contradiction. You write like someone who has survived her own myth. Who now knows that breadcrumbs aren’t meant to get you back, they’re a trail for someone else, some future version of you, or some reader in their own dark wood, clutching a lantern you lit without knowing it.

I hope your words do end up in a box in Joan Didion’s estate, wedged between her sunglasses and a matchbook from The Beverly Hills Hotel. But more than that, I hope they keep finding us, those of us not quite ready to selfie ourselves back into view. We don’t need mirrors when we have voices like yours showing us how to see again, Jeanette!

Expand full comment
13 more comments...

No posts